Saying No (To Yourself) + Why You Should Use Cloudflare

Hope everybody had a great weekend. 😎 Time to jumpstart the new week…

In the WP Edge, I try to mix it up a bit. I do some strategy stuff…. and we also get technical with WordPress stuff. This issue is one of those issues where we have both.

Find yourself overwhelmed by trying to move too many things forward at once? Or having too many ideas and not moving on many of them? Let’s talk about how to say NO…. to yourself.

And then we’ll shift gears into full-on nerd…. by talking about why you should be using CloudFlare.com for your domain’s DNS. It comes with numerous capabilities you won’t find elsewhere (for free)… including things like security rules where you can set up your own firewall around your site.

And for my Concierge clients, I’ve got an update on the hosting changes.

So, let’s dive in and do this thing…

The Solo Business Owner’s Guide to Saying No (to Yourself)

As a solo business owner, there’s one person most likely to derail your strategy.

You.

You have ideas – lots of ideas. You read a blog post about a “must-have” funnel. You see someone on social media swearing by their new AI integration. You watch a tutorial and suddenly want to rebuild your homepage.

But every “yes” to a new idea is a hidden “no” to the plan you already had. The best thing you can do for your business sometimes? Say no to yourself.

It can be a bit of a trick. After all, as a solopreneur, you CAN implement almost anything you want. You’re the sole decision maker. Plus, you’re always looking for ways to grow and increase your leverage. Plus, it can be fun. 😎

But, there is indeed a cost to chasing every idea you come up with. It can cause confusion with your customers and audience. It can dilute your messaging. If your idea involves technical changes to your site, it can increase site bloat. Plus, it splinters your own focus.

That last one is important…. because your FOCUS is like an energy beam. And when you scatter that energy in two many directions at once, you’re not really pushing anything along. You end up with a patchwork of partially finished ideas rather than a trail of completed projects.

Trust me, I know the feeling. 🤪

So, here’s a little framework you can go through to help self-filter your ideas. It is a kind of gut-check before you go off and change everything:

1. Is this idea solving a current bottleneck… or just more exciting than the boring stuff that works?
Sometimes we want novelty because consistency feels… dull. But consistency is where results come from.

2. Is this aligned with my current goal?
If your focus is on improving retention, adding a new lead magnet probably isn’t the move. Stay goal-aligned.

I think a huge part of this is tracking a set of core stats – or KPIs – that align with your core goals. Then, when you track that simple set of numbers, you can implement strategies aimed toward those numbers without getting distracted on shinier objects that don’t have much to do with it.

3. Am I chasing someone else’s version of success?
That guru’s YouTube strategy might work… but does it fit your brand, bandwidth, and business model?

Too often, I find people who consume a lot of content get overloaded with new ideas and end up wanting to do all of them. That’s overwhelming as hell. It is important to stay grounded in your own strategy and your own goals.

4. What’s the real cost of implementing this?
Not just time or money. But attention, complexity, technical debt, and the opportunity cost of not going deeper on what’s already working.

Many times, I’ve watched people go chasing new plugins and new tools as their new bright idea to increase sales or fix something they perceive as an issue. But, stop and ask…

Have you really maxed out your current setup? Is the issue your software…. or perhaps your messaging? Or your offer? Maybe you don’t need that fancy tool that is probably just going to make your site heavier with more plugins. Maybe just tightening up what you already have is the better way to go.

Your Business Doesn’t Need More. It Needs Focus

You don’t need a quiz funnel and a webinar and a podcast.
You don’t need five pricing tiers.
You don’t need to split-test your homepage headline every week.

What you need is clarity – and the discipline to say “not now” to every good idea that isn’t the idea you’re working on right now.

Bottom line…

You’re not likely a lazy person. You’re just overloaded. You’re overwhelmed. And most times, it is a self-created problem.

But your business will grow faster when you get comfortable saying no to yourself. Not forever, just for now.
That’s not quitting. That’s being a CEO.

Concierge Client Update

Hosting Changes – Update

The process of hosting migrations for Concierge clients I talked about in the last issue of the newsletter is under way. At this point, I’ve moved 12 sites out of Rocket.net hosting and over to the new setup.

So far, the results are promising. I mean, if it wasn’t, I wouldn’t be bothering to do all of this work. 😇

Anybody can cache a site for the public and it’ll work pretty quickly. My metric is backend performance. When you’re clicking around the WordPress admin panel, how fast/slow are screen refreshes? And so far, I’m definitely seeing improvements.

Plus, Rocket would sometimes come and go on backend performance. Sometimes, it was pretty good… other times the panels would slow down. This is due to “noisy neighbors”. While Rocket is some of the best hosting available, it is still shared hosting. If the server your site was sitting on was seeing a lot of activity due to somebody else’s site, your site could still slow down.

With the new setup, only Concierge clients are on the servers. And in fact, once my account with Hetzner is cleared, I will be making all client servers dedicated when it comes to CPU/RAM resources. Which means, we don’t share the horsepower with anybody. Then, I can properly manage servers to ensure all sites have more horsepower than they’d need.

Now, I do want to be clear…

While I’m definitely seeing performance improvements and better speed consistency on the new setup, we’re not going to get perfect instantaneous screen refreshes in the admin panel on sites running 40-50+ plugins at a time. It is kinda impossible. The more plugins your site is running, the bigger “footprint” it has and…. it just is what it is. 🤷‍♂️

But, being able to take more granular control over the server setup versus the “one size fits all” setup of Rocket.net is indeed proving to be an advantage. 😎

WordPress News & Updates

Pie Calendar Updates. I am a fan of Pie Calendar as a lightweight replacement for bloated plugins like Events Calendar. It was announced that Pie Calendar is getting a new Connector add-on to integrate with outside systems… and the first two will be EventBrite (for selling event tickets) and external ICS feeds (for importing events from external calendars). The new connector addon plugin will be sold separately, so it can even work with the free version of Pie Calendar. And, lifetime license holders will get it for free. Read more about the new Connector Addon here.

Credit Card Skimmers Embedded in WordPress? In a pretty sophisticated setup, WordFence reports on a rogue WordPress plugin that conceals credit card skimmers in fake PNG files on sites using WooCommerce. It is quite the advanced setup these hackers used to pull this one off. The good news is that it would basically require a pre-existing admin login for these guys to install their plugin, so it isn’t something that is very widespread. Interesting the lengths people will go to commit crimes.

Kadence Updates. Kadence has pushed out some updates (see the Blocks changelog here), but the one they’re promoting the most is the ability to now save custom post layouts directly to your Kadence Pattern Hub. Create custom layouts, save them in your Hub, and then use them across different sites. Funny, I don’t use their Pattern Hub much. It is basically a cloud for you to store your layouts in. Maybe I’ll take another peak at it.

“Managed WordPress” On Track For Trademark. The letters of protest and initial speedbumps in the US for Automattic to officially trademark “managed WordPress” don’t look to be stopping anything. Things look on track for them to be able to trademark “managed WordPress” and “Hosted WordPress”, despite the fact that web hosts have been using this phrase for over a decade. Read more about this stupidity here.

WordPress 7 and Real-Time Collaboration?. Apparently, realtime collaboration on documents (similar to what you see with Google Docs) could be coming to WordPress 7.0. Frankly, I hope they don’t bother with it. I don’t see this as a need for WordPress. They’ve got much more pressing things to address with WordPress 7 than a feature like this that most users would never care about.

WPChat Launch. SmashBalloon (part of Awesome Motive) has launched a new plugin called WPChat. As you may guess by the name, this is a live chat widget you can run on your website to do live chats using WhatsApp, Telegram, Messenger, & Instagram. There’s some overlapping functionality with the WP Social Ninja plugin which can already do this, but the execution of this in WPChat looks pretty nicely done based on the screenshots. Useful for customer support.

Fluently Toolkit Launch. Nelson Miller has launced an addon toolkit for the “Fluent” line of products called Fluently Toolkit. Looks interesting. So far, abilities include enhancements for FluentCRM, FluentCommunity and some on the way for FluentCart. One such FluentCRM upgrade is custom unsubscribe pages. I’ll definitely be watching this one.

MemberPress Gets ClubSuite. MemberPress has launched some new addons to enable community functionality on your membership site. The ClubSuite brings in a member directory, profiles, and private discussion boards. Seems to me they’re trying to compete with BuddyBoss. But, I would stick with FluentCommunity any day over either one of those. Remember, MemberPress is an Awesome Motive product, with all that that entails. 🤪

Why You Should Use Cloudflare

When you have a domain, you set up nameservers for it that tell the world where you manage your DNS. DNS are the domain name settings. It is basically all the “stuff” which tells the world where your website is, where your email goes, etc.

I always use Cloudflare.com for managing DNS. Not only for myself… but all of my clients unless they ask me not to (which is rare).

While Cloudflare can be a little nerdy and definitely has expensive paid options, I only use the FREE plans for all domains I manage and it works perfectly fine.

In fact, using Cloudflare has numerous advantages that most domain registrars just cannot do. I know a lot of people like to buy their domains with Godaddy or Namecheap… and many manage their DNS right there. I wouldn’t. I would direct it to Cloudflare and do it there. Here’s why…

Cloudflare has all kinds of built-in features that can come in handy. And when you enable that little orange toggle on your DNS to turn on their proxy, that means you can do all kinds of things you would never be able to do with any domain registrar.

Things like:

• Use what’s called Edge Caching, essentially using Cloudflare as a CDN absolutely for free. In fact, the Super Page Cache plugin makes this brain dead easy.
• You can use Cloudflare’s AI Crawl Control to help keep AI bots from scraping your site and slowing things down.
• Cloudflare can help mitigate bots from hitting your site.
• You can set up easy redirect rules, URL rewrites, etc.
• You can set up security rules that do a REALLY good job of protecting your site from bots.
• You can use the Scrape Shield, that will automatically obfuscate email addresses on your site and use hotlink protection on images so people can’t embed your site’s images on their own sites.

There’s a lot more to it, too.

On the free plan, you do have limits. For instance, you can only use 3 page rules. You can only use 5 security rules. But, I’ve rarely found those limits to be an issue.

Now because Cloudflare is at the DNS level, all these things can be done without ever hitting your server. Which means, for example, if you have rules in place to protect from bots, it is literally like having a shield over your site. The bots never get to your server in the first place…. which keeps your site performance high and helps minimize the need for WordPress to defend itself via various plugins.

Now, if you wanna experiment with implementing your own web application firewall (or WAF) using the security rules and do it for free, check out Troy’s WAF rules. He’s from Web Agency Hero and his free-to-copy rules are pretty well known in the space for being extremely effective. It protects your site from aggressive crawlers and all kinds of bots. It doesn’t outright block everything, but will instead present a “managed challenge” where the bot would need to verify they’re human.

I implemented these WAF rules (with a few minor tweaks) on my own site and it immediately caught a bot server from Germany just POUNDING my site. In a span of about 2 hours, these rules blocked about 50,000 requests to my website.

As I am moving clients to my new server environment, I am actually implementing these WAF rules and it really helps a LOT when it comes to reducing bot traffic.

But, couldn’t do it at all if I wasn’t using Cloudflare. 😎

And that’s why I recommend you do, as well.